Etymologies

(American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)

Examples

Cassian himself dwells on the horrible liability of the monks to the principal vices which infest human nature — gluttony, uncleanness, avarice, anger, vainglory, pride — above all, that despairing and unaccountable melancholy which they call acedia, and describe as “the demon that walketh in the noonday.”

And as the subtitle promises the themes it will explore are the intersections of acedia with the writer's marriage -- especially with her husband's illness and death; with monks, who come in both because Norris first encountered the term acedia in the writings of the desert fathers and because she's a Benedictine oblate and thus has found that participating in the monastic life as a lay person has been for her a primary means of combating acedia; and the writing life, both Norris and her late husband are published poets.

Simple boredom is the sort you suffer from during long Christmas dinners or political speeches; "existential" boredom is more complex and persistent, taking in many conditions, such as melancholia, depression, world weariness and what the psalmist called the "destruction that wasteth at noonday"—or spiritual despair, often referred to as acedia or accidie.

Words that are more generic or abstract

Wordmap

Word visualization

Comments

"Melancholy, as it was called until the twentieth century, is of course a very ancient problem, and was described in the fifth century BC by Hippocrates. Chaucer's fourteenth-century characters were aware of it, and late medieval churchmen knew it as acedia, which was technically a sin, since it often led to the neglect of religious obligations."—Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 133

Gee, just what a depressed person needs: to be told that being depressed is a sin.